New pamphlet analyzes dynamics of of African American struggle for justice and the Legacy of Malcolm X

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10 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 1992 was written by Kwame M.A. Somburu, who worked with Malcolm X during the last year of his life.

During the early 1960s, I became actively involved in political, economic, and cultural issues relating to Africa and African Americans. This included my participation in the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU)-formed by Malcolm X in 1964. I attended almost every meeting of the OAAU in the Audubon Ballroom—where he was later assassinated-and other places.

Malcolm's speeches contributed much to my understanding of the centuries-long struggle of my people for Black liberation and self-determination.

Malcolm X was the leading advocate of the most progressive Black nationalism ever to be advanced in this country. Malcolm's Black nationalism was unique. It was inherently class conscious-that is, while it was attuned to the consciousness of Black Americans as a whole, it was most sensitive to the concrete situation of the Black working class concentrated in the ghettos of America's large cities.

Malcolm's Black nationalism, moreover, was internationalist-that is, it advanced the unity of Blacks with all victims of exploitation and oppression in the fight for liberation and self-determination in this country and in the world.

To me and many others, the OAAU was the most promising of many organizational and programmatic attempts by African Americans to defeat the varying types of mental, economic, physical, and cultural enslavement that we have been subjected to.

I have personally participated in efforts— before and after the OAAU-to get independent Black political movements going. These included helping to build such groups as the Harlem chapter of the Freedom Now Party, Afro-Americans Against the War in Vietnam, and the National Black Independent Political Party. And I believe that such an independent Black movement, relevant to the 1990's, is needed now more than ever.

Since 1960, I saw myself as a Black nationalist, socialist, and internationalist. These are not contradictory conceptions, as you will better see after reading this pamphlet.

That's why besides participating in building independent Black movements, I have been a socialist since 1965 and a member of Socialist Action (SA) since 1984. I consider the following ideas, advanced on this subject by my party, to be a unique and vital contribution to the Black liberation movement in America. Malcolm X's unique contribution To best understand the contents of this pamphlet, we must look back to 1963, when Malcolm X commented to the news media in the aftermath of U.S. President John F. Kennedy's assassination, that "the chickens have come home to roost." This simple statement of fact cut across the myth, widespread even then, that this political representative of the rich and powerful, John F. Kennedy, was a friend of Blacks, of workers, of all the downtrodden and disadvantaged members of society.

Having served less than three years of his term, President Kennedy's hands were already stained with the blood of tens of thousands of poor Vietnamese peasants and other colonial peoples who dared to fight for freedom and independence.

Malcolm's trampling over the Kennedy myth aroused the white capitalist rulers of America to an apoplectic fury. They had already taken notice of his phenomenal rise With an Introduction by Kwame M.A. Somburu from nowhere to mobilize masses to enter the struggle for Black liberation in the Northern ghettos; they had good reason to fear him. Malcolm's campaign against the cynical de facto racism of Northern "liberals" had the effect of extending the Southern struggle against "Jim Crow" laws to the rest of the country.

Racist capitalism had already given backhanded credit to Malcolm by having organized a slander campaign in the mass media against the man they called the outstanding exponent of hate—a "racist in reverse." But after Malcolm trashed the Kennedy myth, the ruling class-through their monopoly over the mass media-agitated for his head on a platter.

Malcolm X had earned the enmity of white rulers as the Nation of Islam's most effective champion of its Black nationalist strategy for winning liberation for Black America. Malcolm X had begun a remarkable transformation of the "Black Muslims," as they were then widely known, from a small religious sect into a burgeoning and promising revolutionary force for Black liberation.

He had shown an unmatched ability to capture the simmering anger and rebellious mood of the Black masses in the ghettos of Northern cities. In just a few short years, he became their most effective spokesman.

The ruling-class assault on him after the events following Kennedy's assassination was intended to compel the Nation of Islam to sacrifice its most effective organizer, agitator, and propagandist. Elijah Muhammad, the spiritual leader of the Nation, evidently having panicked at the real threat of a massive governmental campaign of repression, ordered Malcolm X to be silent for six months and, in effect, to be excluded in this period from any public role as a leader of the Nation of Islam.

But Malcolm knew that Muhammad's side-lining him for six months would not satisfy the white powers-that-be. They would not accept anything less than his complete shackling or his destruction as a mass agitator and organizer. He had no alternative but to break with Elijah Muhammad and carry on the work of mobilizing Black America independently of the Nation of Isiam.

The year 1963 was a time when the phenomenal mass mobilizations by Black America against the system of Jim Crow, the American form of apartheid, were mounting and, with the help of Malcolm X was threatening to spill over from the Bulent form of racial injustice prevailed. This semi-revolutionary Black upsurge soon forced the American rulers into an historical retreat culminating in the complete abolition of the legally enforced system of second-class citizenship for Blacks in the Jim Crow states of the American South.

Malcolm X was one of those authentic revolutionaries able to see through appearances and see the road ahead. This insight prepared him for leading Black America to the next stage of its struggle for freedom-the struggle against Northern-style racial oppression and super-exploitation.

His message was loud and clear: Yes, Jim Crow is bad; but only hypocrites and fools will tell you that the suffering of Black America will come to an end it Jim Crow laws are abolished. This prediction didn't require foresight as much as it required the simple capability to see things as they really are.

Anyone who wanted to could see that, while the northern cities were free of apartheid-type laws separating society into first and second class citizens, Blacks were nevertheless restricted to the worst jobs, paid the lowest wages, condemnea to live in the worst housing while paying the highest rents, and their children's education stunted in the most overcrowded, de facto segregated schools.

Malcolm X, as we know, began to carry out his attempt to build a mass Black nationalist liberation movement. In the course of his travels, he met with leaders of the Algerian revolution. Through his discussions with them, and with other socialists he met during his travels abroad, he came to the conclusion that the real villain was capitalism. The amazing evolution of Malcolm X in the last year of his life no doubt contributed heavily to his assassination.

Two roads to freedom The civil rights movement exemplified one of two main strategic roads followed by African Americans in their over 400year freedom struggle. This strategy is based on the simple idea that Black Americans should have the rights of all other citizens. They should have the right to integrate themselves into American society "with freedom and justice for all."

In the ongoing struggle for Black liberation the integrationist road is taken when a section of white society-for its own social, economic or political reasons— responds to Black people to form an alliance to gain a common objective.

The other strategic road followed by Blacks is often taken when the road to freedom through integration is blocked by the withdrawal of white allies from such an alliance. The history of the African American freedom struggle shows that this other road came under the heading of Negro or Black nationalism.

The following pages are divided into three closely connected parts. It records Socialist Action's conception of the ongoing struggles by Blacks for liberation from national oppression and by the working class for their own liberation from wage slavery. It is the fruit of over 100 years of revolutionary Marxist thought on the question of the interrelation of the struggle of the world's oppressed nationalities and its working classes for social, economic, and political liberation.

• The first section is a resolution, "Black Self-Determination and Socialist Revolution in the United States," adopted by the July 29-Aug. 2, 1992, Socialist Action national convention.

This resolution was drafted in February of that year by Socialist Action National Committee member Nat Weinstein and adopted by the Socialist Action Political Committee, and later the National Committee. It was then presented to SA members for its consideration over a fourmonth written and oral discussion period preceding the organization's national convention (the highest decision-making body of Socialist Action).

• The second section is the SA National Committee majority's "Report on the Black Resolution," which was delivered to the 1992 national convention by National Committee member Jim Henle.

• The third section, "The Meaning of the Rebellion in L.A.," was drafted by Nat Weinstein and published as an editorial in a special supplement to the May 1992 edition of Socialist Action newspaper in the immediate aftermath of the Los Angeles rebellion. It is especially important because it constituted further evidence of the accuracy of Socialist Action's conception of the coming American revolution as a combined revolution for both Black liberation and socialism.

This conception derives from my party's belief that because the conquest of full democracy for Blacks in the United States will be so costly to capitalism, the capitalist rulers will stop at nothing to block it. Black liberation could be won only by the overthrow of the capitalist state and its replacement by a workers government-in which American Blacks are certain to play a vanguard role.

Such an alliance of revolutionary Black nationalists and the revolutionary working class in the United States flows directly from the theory of Permanent Revolution authored by Leon Trotsky, who was, along with V.I. Lenin, a principle leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution.

Lenin was one of revolutionary Marxism's major contributors to the theory of scientific socialism, one of his important contributions being a deepening of the movement's understanding of the national question.

Trotsky, after Lenin died, became the principal leader of the opposition to Stalinist degeneration of the revolutionary state created by the October Revolution. This uncompromising revolutionary Marxist was exiled by Joseph Stalin to Alma Ata, an isolated region of the Soviet Union in Central Asia, in January 1927. And then in January 1929, he was deported by Stalin from the territory of the USSR.

In August 1940, after a decade in which he was hounded from country to country by the Soviet dictator and his agents, Leon Trotsky was murdered by a Stalinist agent while in his final exile in Coyoacán, MexiCO.

• Finally, the fourth section of this pamphlet, titled "New Malcolm X biography slanders the man and his ideas," is a reprint of an article that appeared in the February 1992 issue of Socialist Action newspaper. The author of the article, Roland Sheppard, collaborated with Malcolm X in his last year alive. He criticizes the biography written by Bruce Perry for its inaccuracies and slanders and corrects the record.

We welcome comments on the contents of this pamphlet and may publish them in coming issues of Socialist Action newspaper. And we are prepared to send speakers to any groups interested in this subject.

To order a copy of "The Coming Black Rebelllon, "sand $2 to Soclalist Action, 3425 Army St., San Francisco, CA 9411.